"Steve Jobs"

Copywriter

Steve Jobs was a genius. Aaron Sorkin is a genius. I had to boil down two geniuses to a :60 cut and one line. No pressure.

The Setup

The Steve Jobs film isn't simply a biopic. It's a three-act courtroom drama where Jobs plays the prosecutor, the defendant, and the evidence. In almost every scene, he's a jerk but he's brilliant. Sorkin built an engine so dead on that trying to summarize it felt like rewriting the biopic.

The Stakes

But if we talk about only Jobs' Apple genius, we risk losing the audience. Talk about the throughline underneath, the audience will never buy a ticket. The trailer couldn't tell the story — it's disjointed, at best. The trailer had to ask the question the story was built around.

The Story

Sitting in the editing bay, I wrote the copy and worked the strategy around a single line:

Can a great man be a good man?

Listening to Sorkin's script over and over again, that's what the entire film is built around. Head vs heart.

We cut three versions with the same line. It worked across all of them.

The Impact

One line. Three cuts. Zero answers given.
One question did what your normal trailer summary couldn't — it made the complex, crazy structure the selling point.
More than 16 million YouTube views.
6500+ comments with Steve Wozniak himself saying the trailer "Captured the real Jobs."